This invention is concerned with improving knife sharpeners of the type which use angularly disposed cooperating angulated pairs of abrasive rollers or grinding wheels between which a knife blade may be drawn to sharpen its edge by grinding it toward the cutting edge on both sides simultaneously.
Typical knife sharpeners which the present invention improves are disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 1,426,911, 1,177,821, and 2,544,777. Although prior art knife sharpeners of the general type here under consideration could possibly be capable of sharpening knife blades effectively they are not known to have been successful in the market place. Perhaps the main reason for the apparent lack of success in the consumer's market is that prior sharpeners would be costly to produce and would necessarily have a retail sale price that would make then unattractive to customers. Inspection of known prior art reveals that previous sharpener designs require a large number of parts which are costly to manufacture and compel a substantial number of assembly operations such as applying nuts and washers and peening the ends of shafts and so forth. Moreover, there is no suggestion in the prior art as to how the designs can be altered to reduce the number of parts and, hence, to simplify assembly nor to enable mass manufacture such as by using molded parts primarily.